Will protesting voters come to election polls?

Launching website called pollscontrol has become one of the most interesting events of the presidential election campaign.Surprisingly enough, the action of the society control over voting on the election day attracted big audience. In several days 20,000 people from different countries visited the website. The group of activists managed to collect (through online donations) enough funds to pay observers at voting polls.

100 Russian citizens have agreed to be observers on a volunteer basis. All this confirms that Russian people still value liberal democracy.

The audience for the website are people whose essential need is maintaining rights and freedoms of citizens.

The results of voting for the presidential candidates among the website visitors are interesting. Vladimir Putin surpassed Irina Khakamada only with small number of votes, Ms. Khakamada overtook Sergey Glaziev with few votes as well. This survey allows to make the conclusion that political preferences within Russian society do not depend much on personalities of certain politicians. The turning point is whether a person supports the policy of the authorities or not. For people it is not important that Irina Khakamada and Sergey Glaziev represent different kinds of opposition, they are concerned with the threat of authoritarianism in Russia. By voting for opposition politicians, people primarily want to protest against the authorities and demand more civil liberties, not to provide actual support to the opposition. On March 14 we will know if such “protesting” voters go to election polls.

More than 5.8 million people voted for Nicholas Maduro at the presidential election in Venezuela. This is more than a quarter of registered voters. Why did those people vote for the man, who, as Western media write, took Venezuela to the brink of collapse?